Carbon dots (CDs) are photoluminescent nanomaterials with wide-ranging applications. Despite their photoactivity, it remains unknown whether CDs degrade under illumination and whether such ...photodegradation poses any cytotoxic effects. Here, we show laboratory-synthesized CDs irradiated with light degrade into molecules that are toxic to both normal (HEK-293) and cancerous (HeLa and HepG2) human cells. Eight days of irradiation photolyzes 28.6-59.8% of the CDs to <3 kilo Dalton molecules, 1431 of which are detected by high-throughput, non-target high-performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Molecular network and community analysis further reveal 499 cytotoxicity-related molecules, 212 of which contain polyethylene glycol, glucose, or benzene-related structures. Photo-induced production of hydroxyl and alkyl radicals play important roles in CD degradation as affected by temperature, pH, light intensity and wavelength. Commercial CDs show similar photodegraded products and cytotoxicity profiles, demonstrating that photodegradation-induced cytotoxicity is likely common to CDs regardless of their chemical composition. Our results highlight the importance of light in cytocompatibility studies of CDs.
Abstract Objective We assessed the relationship between chronic diseases and risk for depression in old age. Method MEDLINE, EMBASE, The Cochrane Library database were used to identify potential ...studies. All of the clinical studies that obtained data on the association between chronic diseases and risk of depression among individuals aged 55 years or older were identified and included in this review. The studies were classified into cross-sectional and longitudinal subsets. The quantitative meta-analysis of cross-sectional studies and that of longitudinal studies were preformed, respectively. For prevalence and incidence rates of depression, odds risk (OR) and relative risk (RR) were calculated, respectively. Results Since all but one study found in the search was for individuals 60 years of age or over, we assessed and report on results for this larger group only. 24 cross-sectional and 7 prospective longitudinal studies were included in this review. The quantitative meta-analysis showed that, among chronic diseases, stroke, loss of hearing, loss of vision, cardiac disease or chronic lung disease had both a significant OR and RR for increased depression in old age; arthritis, hypertension or diabetes had a significant OR but an un-significant RR for increased depression in old age; and gastrointestinal disease had neither a significant OR nor a significant RR for increased depression in old age. Conclusions We concluded here that in old age, the associations of depression with some chronic diseases were definite; among these chronic diseases, stroke, loss of hearing, loss of vision, cardiac disease and chronic lung disease were risk factors for increased depression, but it should be further investigated whether arthritis, hypertension and diabetes were risk factors for increased depression or not.
IMPORTANCE: Postoperative delirium (POD) is a common condition for older adults, contributing to their functional decline. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effectiveness of the Tailored, Family-Involved ...Hospital Elder Life Program (t-HELP) for preventing POD and functional decline in older patients after a noncardiac surgical procedure. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: A 2-arm, parallel-group, single-blind, cluster randomized clinical trial was conducted from August 24, 2015, to February 28, 2016, on 6 surgical floors (gastric, colorectal, pancreatic, biliary, thoracic, and thyroid) of West China Hospital in Chengdu, China. Eligible participants (n = 281) admitted to each of the 6 surgical floors were randomized into a nursing unit providing t-HELP (intervention group) or a nursing unit providing usual care (control group). All randomized patients were included in the intention-to-treat analyses for the primary outcome of POD incidence. Statistical analysis was performed from April 3, 2016, to December 30, 2017. INTERVENTIONS: In addition to receiving usual care, all participants in the intervention group received the t-HELP protocols, which addressed each patient’s risk factor profile. Besides nursing professionals, family members and paid caregivers were involved in the delivery of many of the program interventions. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES: The primary outcome was the incidence of POD, evaluated with the Confusion Assessment Method. Secondary outcomes included the pattern of functional and cognitive changes (activities of daily living ADLs, instrumental activities of daily living IADLs, Short Portable Mental Status Questionnaire SPMSQ) from hospital admission to 30 days after discharge, and the length of hospital stay (LOS). RESULTS: Of the 475 patients screened for eligibility, 281 (171 60.9% male, mean SD age 74.7 5.2 years) were enrolled and randomized to receive t-HELP (n = 152) or usual care (n = 129). Postoperative delirium occurred in 4 participants (2.6%) in the intervention group and in 25 (19.4%) in the control group, with a relative risk of 0.14 (95% CI, 0.05-0.38). The number needed to treat to prevent 1 case of POD was 5.9 (95% CI, 4.2-11.1). Participants in the intervention group compared with the control group showed less decline in physical function (median interquartile range for ADLs: −5 −10 to 0 vs −20 −30 to −10; P < .001; for IADLs: −2 −2 to 0 vs −4 −4 to −2; P < .001) and cognitive function (for the SPMSQ level: 1 0.8% vs 8 7.0%; P = .009) at discharge, as well as shorter mean (SD) LOS (12.15 3.78 days vs 16.41 4.69 days; P < .001). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: The findings suggest that t-HELP, with family involvement at its core, is effective in reducing POD for older patients, maintaining or improving their physical and cognitive functions, and shortening the LOS. The results of this t-HELP trial may improve generalizability and increase the implementation of this program. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry Identifier: ChiCTR-POR-15006944
Objective: the goal of this study was to determine the relationship between health status, including self-rated health status and chronic disease, and risk for depression among the elderly. Method: ...MEDLINE, EMBASE and The Cochrane Library Database were used to identify potential studies. The studies were classified into cross-sectional and longitudinal subsets. For each study, the numbers of the total participants, cases (for cross-sectional study) or incident cases (for longitudinal study) of depression in each health status group were extracted and entered into Review Manager 4.2. The quantitative meta-analysis of cross-sectional studies and that of longitudinal studies were performed, respectively. For prevalence and incidence rates of depression, odds risk and relative risk (RR) were calculated, respectively. Results: the quantitative meta-analysis showed that, compared with the elderly without chronic disease, those with chronic disease had higher risk for depression (RR: 1.53, 95% confidence intervals (CI): 1.20–1.97). Compared with the elderly with good self-rated health, those with poor self-rated health had higher risk for depression (RR: 2.40, 95% CI: 1.94–2.97). Conclusions: despite the methodological limitations of this meta-analysis, both poor self-rated health status and the presence of chronic disease are risk factors for depression among the elderly. In the elderly, poor self-reported health status appears to be more strongly associated with depression than the presence of chronic disease.
Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a life-threatening complication characterized by rapid decline in renal function, which frequently occurs after transplantation surgery. However, the molecular mechanism ...underlying the development of post-transplant (post-Tx) AKI still remains unknown. An increasing number of studies have demonstrated that certain microRNAs (miRNAs) exert crucial functions in AKI. The present study sought to elucidate the molecular mechanisms in post-Tx AKI by constructing a regulatory miRNA-mRNA network.
Based on two datasets (GSE53771 and GSE53769), three key modules, which contained 55 mRNAs, 76 mRNAs, and 151 miRNAs, were identified by performing weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA). The miRDIP v4.1 was applied to predict the interactions of key module mRNAs and miRNAs, and the miRNA-mRNA pairs with confidence of more than 0.2 were selected to construct a regulatory miRNA-mRNA network by Cytoscape. The miRNA-mRNA network consisted of 82 nodes (48 mRNAs and 34 miRNAs) and 125 edges. Two miRNAs (miR-203a-3p and miR-205-5p) and ERBB4 with higher node degrees compared with other nodes might play a central role in post-Tx AKI. Additionally, Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis indicated that this network was mainly involved in kidney-/renal-related functions and PI3K-Akt/HIF-1/Ras/MAPK signaling pathways.
We constructed a regulatory miRNA-mRNA network to provide novel insights into post-Tx AKI development, which might help discover new biomarkers or therapeutic drugs for enhancing the ability for early prediction and intervention and decreasing mortality rate of AKI after transplantation.
Abstract
Background
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, it has been documented that old age and underlying illnesses are associated with poor prognosis among COVID-19 patients. However, it is unknown ...whether sarcopenia, a common geriatric syndrome, is associated with poor prognosis among older COVID-19 patients. The aim of our prospective cohort study is to investigate the association between sarcopenia risk and severe disease among COVID-19 patients aged ≥60 years.
Method
A prospective cohort study of 114 hospitalized older patients (≥60 years) with confirmed COVID-19 pneumonia between 7 February, 2020 and 6 April, 2020. Epidemiological, socio-demographic, clinical and laboratory data on admission and outcome data were extracted from electronic medical records. All patients were assessed for sarcopenia on admission using the SARC-F scale and the outcome was the development of the severe disease within 60 days. We used the Cox proportional hazards model to identify the association between sarcopenia and progression of disease defined as severe cases in a total of 2908 person-days.
Result
Of 114 patients (mean age 69.52 ± 7.25 years, 50% woman), 38 (33%) had a high risk of sarcopenia while 76 (67%) did not. We found that 43 (38%) patients progressed to severe cases. COVID-19 patients with higher risk sarcopenia were more likely to develop severe disease than those without (68% versus 22%,
p < 0.001
). After adjustment for demographic and clinical factors, higher risk sarcopenia was associated with a higher hazard of severe condition hazard ratio = 2.87 (95% CI, 1.33–6.16).
Conclusion
We found that COVID-19 patients with higher sarcopenia risk were more likely to develop severe condition. A clinician-friendly assessment of sarcopenia could help in early warning of older patients at high-risk with severe COVID-19 pneumonia.
Search result diversification aims to retrieve diverse results to satisfy as many different information needs as possible. Supervised methods have been proposed recently to learn ranking functions ...and they have been shown to produce superior results to unsupervised methods. However, these methods use implicit approaches based on the principle of Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR). In this paper, we propose a learning framework for explicit result diversification where subtopics are explicitly modeled. Based on the information contained in the sequence of selected documents, we use the attention mechanism to capture the subtopics to be focused on while selecting the next document, which naturally fits our task of document selection for diversification. As a preliminary attempt, we employ recurrent neural networks and max pooling to instantiate the framework. We use both distributed representations and traditional relevance features to model documents in the implementation. The framework is flexible to model query intent in either a flat list or a hierarchy. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms all the existing search result diversification approaches.
The potential of marine natural products as effective drugs for osteoporosis treatment is an understudied area. In this study, we investigated the ability of lead compounds from deep-sea-derived ...Penicillium solitum MCCC 3A00215 to promote bone formation in vitro and in vivo. We found that penicopeptide A (PPA) promoted osteoblast mineralization among bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) in a concentration-dependent manner, and thus, we selected this natural peptide for further testing. Our further experiments showed that PPA significantly promoted the osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs while inhibiting their adipogenic differentiation and not affecting their chondrogenic differentiation. Mechanistic studies showed that PPA binds directly to the AKT and GSK-3β and activates phosphorylation of AKT and GSK-3β, resulting in the accumulation of β-catenin. We also evaluated the therapeutic potential of PPA in a female mouse model of ovariectomy-induced systemic bone loss. In this model, PPA treatment prevented decreases in bone volume and trabecular thickness. In conclusion, our in vitro and in vivo results demonstrated that PPA could promote osteoblast-related bone formation via the AKT, GSK-3β, and β-catenin signaling pathways, indicating the clinical potential of PPA as a candidate compound for osteoporosis prevention.
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The influence of hollow ZSM-5 catalysts prepared with two different kinds of alkalis on catalytic performances in methanol to aromatics was studied. It was found that benzene, toluene, and xylene ...(BTX) selectivities of hollow catalysts were higher than the parent ZSM-5 catalyst due to increasing mesopore volumes and acid strength. Meanwhile, the catalyst prepared by NaOH treatment exhibited higher BTX selectivity than the catalyst prepared by tetrapropylammonium hydroxide treatment. The reason was that the concentration of strong acid sites, Brønsted acid sites, and framework alumina in channel crossings was higher than that of the catalyst prepared by NaOH treatment. All these favored the formation of aromatics. Moreover, the introduction of hollow structures with mesopores improved diffusion behaviors of species and reduced the deactivation rate of the catalysts. However, a relatively higher deactivation rate was obtained over the NaOH-treated sample due to increasing strong acid sites.
•Systemic inflammation plays an important role in the progression of sarcopenia.•NLR, PLR and SII are simple, widely available and affordable markers of systemic inflammation.•Higher NLR, PLR, and ...SII level are associated with an increased prevalence of sarcopenia.•Regular follow-up of systemic inflammatory markers may be an effective strategy in sarcopenia screening and management.
Increased evidence suggests chronic inflammation is significant in the progression of sarcopenia in older adults. In this study, we aimed to compare the level of systemic inflammation markers (White blood cells, neutrophils, lymphocytes, platelets and their derived ratios) between sarcopenic and non-sarcopenic individuals and investigate the association of these inflammatory markers with sarcopenia.
This cross-sectional study included 4224 adults (1514 men and 2710 women) from the West China Health and Aging Trend (WCHAT) study. Sarcopenia was defined according to the recommended diagnostic algorithm of the Asia Working Group for Sarcopenia (AWGS). The value of systemic inflammatory markers was based on laboratory data. Multiple logistic regression analysis was used to explore the association between inflammatory markers and sarcopenia after adjusting for covariates.
Among 4224 participants (mean age 62.3 ± 8.2 years, 64.2 % women), 814 (19.3 %) were diagnosed as sarcopenia. After adjusting for potential confounders, logistic regression analysis indicated that neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR) and systemic immune-inflammation index (SII) were significantly associated with sarcopenia. Participants in the highest NLR, PLR and SII value group had higher odds for sarcopenia than those in the lowest value group (OR 95 %CI: 1.233 1.002,1.517, 1.455 1.177,1.799 and 1.268 1.029,1.561, respectively).
Higher NLR, PLR, and SII level are associated with an increased prevalence of sarcopenia in middle-aged and older adults. Since these systemic inflammatory markers are inexpensive and can be obtained easily from routine blood tests, regular follow-up of NLR, PLR and SII may be an effective strategy in sarcopenia screening and management.
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